Retracted Indian research papers keep getting cited long after withdrawal, study finds

Withdrawing a flawed research paper does not fix the scientific record because other studies that cited it remain in circulation, experts warn, and nearly a third of all citations to retracted Indian government-funded papers occurred after the withdrawal.

Research scholar P.R. Devanath and associate professor Rupesh Kumar of Tumkur University, Karnataka, examined more than 12,000 citations of government-funded papers that were later retracted and discovered that 30% of those citations happened post-retraction. Their 2026 study also identified a "cascading retraction effect" in which some withdrawn papers continued to be cited by studies that were themselves eventually retracted, with nearly 64% of those second-generation papers authored by the same research groups through self-citation.

Why retracted papers continue to spread

Many post-retraction citations failed to acknowledge the paper's withdrawn status, and some retracted studies even appeared in patents, according to Devanath. He identified lack of awareness as a key driver, particularly among early-career researchers with limited training in responsible citation practices.

Bhaskar Mukherjee, professor and head of the Department of Library and Information Science at Banaras Hindu University, said retractions receive little institutional attention in India. Journals rarely notify an author's institution, and researchers themselves often avoid discussing retracted papers, leaving information confined within journal systems.

Partha Pratim Majumder, former National Science Chair with the Science and Engineering Research Board, explained that retraction is part of science's self-correction mechanism, but the correction often comes long after a paper has entered the literature and other researchers have already built on its findings. Investigations take time, and there is no foolproof way to quickly inform researchers when a paper is withdrawn.

Deeper structural problems

Gagandeep Kang, adjunct professor of microbiology at Christian Medical College, Vellore, argued that better communication alone is insufficient. A reactive system removes problematic papers but does little to understand why they passed scientific scrutiny initially. A stronger research integrity system would identify whether the problem was fraud, honest error, or failure of replication and use those lessons to improve peer review, data-sharing practices, and institutional accountability.

Achal Agrawal, founder of India Research Watch, noted the challenge extends beyond scholarly publishing. As AI systems increasingly draw on published research, retracted studies may continue to influence AI-generated responses unless those models are updated to flag withdrawn papers.

Majumder said determining when a retraction has achieved its purpose is "very difficult". He believes a retraction will have broadly succeeded when about 90% of researchers in that field are aware of it, though complete awareness is impossible. Yet even widespread awareness would not mean the scientific record has been corrected. When errors are inadvertent, they get corrected when experiments are repeated, but that process may never occur in every case. No scientist may be willing to study the same problem addressed in a retracted paper and generate correct data, he added, meaning "the scientific record may never be corrected".

Source: The Hindu